Gail Fenske

This is a chronicle of the Woolworth Building, one of the largest and most conspicuous monuments of American 20th-century culture.

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York

Once the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building is noted for its striking but incongruous synthesis of Beaux-Arts architecture, fanciful Gothic ornamentation, and audacious steel-framed engineering. Here, in the first history of this great urban landmark, Gail Fenske argues that its design serves as a compelling lens through which to view the distinctive urban culture of Progressive-era New York. Fenske shows here that the building’s multiplicity of meanings reflected the cultural contradictions that defined New York City’s modernity. For Frank Woolworth—founder of the famous five-and-dime store chain—the building served as a towering trademark, for advocates of the City Beautiful movement it suggested a majestic hotel de ville, for technological enthusiasts it represented the boldest of experiments in vertical construction, and for tenants it provided an evocative setting for high-style consumption. Tourists, meanwhile, experienced a spectacular sightseeing destination and avant-garde artists discovered a twentieth-century future. In emphasizing this faceted significance, Fenske illuminates the process of conceiving, financing, and constructing skyscrapers as well as the mass phenomena of consumerism, marketing, news media, and urban spectatorship that surround them. As the representative example of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building remains a commanding presence in the skyline of lower Manhattan, and the generously illustrated Skyscraper and the City is a worthy testament to its importance in American culture.

The Skyscraper and the City

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Barbara Lee Diamonstein

Shows the broad range of 17th, 18th, and 19th-century structures that have survived in New York City, from town houses to country manors, from public buildings to commercial palaces, as well as 20th-century skyscrapers.
Includes over 900 photographs and 73 maps.

Huge Hardcover (6 to 8 lbs)

Landmarks of New York III

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Andrew S. Dolkart

This book offers maps, details, and stories about touring lower Manhattan.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Walks in Three Historic Districts

Touring Lower Manhattan

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Mike Wallace

This volume takes up the story of the urban behemoth created by municipal consolidation in 1898 and now lauching in to the 20th century.

A History of New York City from 1898 To 1919

"Between consolidation and the end of World War One, New York was transformed and transforming, mirroring the juggernauting dynamism of the country at large--and largely fueling it. The names of two of its streets encapsulate the degree of the city's preeminence: Wall Street and Broadway. [This book] reveals the workings of the city's consolidation; the emerging hegemony of its financial markets, which effectively reconstructed U.S. capitalism; the influx of migrants from other continents and from the American South; the development of its massive infrastructure--subways and waterways and electrical grid; and New York's growing dominance over the arts, media, and entertainment"--Provided by publisher.

Greater Gotham

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Edwin G. Burrows

Mike Wellace

A monumental history of New York City, from the earliest Indian peoples to its consolidation as Greater New York in 1898.
At more than 1,300 pages, this is a major history book.

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A History of New York City To 1898

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe.

In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise
of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city.

The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.


Gotham

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Freddy Langer

Documents the progress of the Empire State Building's 1930 - 1931 construction in photograpghs.

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The Empire State Building

A collection of black-and-white photographs that document the construction of the Empire State Building, completed in 1931, with information about photographer Lewis W. Hine.

Lewis W. Hine

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Ross Wetzsteon

Vibrant portrait of the Village through the remarkable and often interrelated stories of its legendary residents. 

Greenwich Village: the American Bohemia, 1910-1960

Chronicles the New York City neighborhood's role as a bohemian enclave that became the home of and transformed the lives of individuals who came to the neighborhood to pursue their individual artistic, personal, and political dreams.

Republic of Dreams

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This exhibition and its catalogue, with its walking tours, opens the wide spectrum of public sculpture to most of us.


By 19th-Century American Artists 

New York City Public Sculpture 

Laura Rosen

Laura Watkins

These photographs capture a world where landscape and architecture meet.

An Expedition Around Manhattan Island

Offers a photographic tour of the coastline of the island of Manhattan, from the upper Harlem River to Riverside Park and the George Washington Bridge

Manhattan Shores

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Eugene de Salignac

Michael Lorenzini

Kevin Moore

These photographs document the creation of the city's infrastructure--bridges, major buildings, roads,  and subways.


Drawing from more than 20,000 glass-plate negatives and 10,000 vintage photographic prints, this large-format catalog features the work of Eugene de Salignac, official photographer of the New York City Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures from 1906 to 1945. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of de Salignac's work at the Museum of the City of New York, it includes chapters on his photographs of city inspections, accidents, and the city's major bridges.

Eugene de Salignac: New York Rises

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Ellen Raskin

The mysterious death of an eccentric millionaire brings together an unlikely assortment of heirs who must uncover the circumstances of his death before they can claim their inheritance.

The Westing Game (Puffin Modern Classics)

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Christopher Paul Curtis

Classic story of a boy in search of his father.

(Newbery Medal Winner)

AfterSchool Kidzlit is a program of reading and connected activities for grades K to 8, with appealing books and easy-to-use leader's guides for: games; talk topics; role-play; cool words; art, music, and drama; hands-on projects; reading aloud, partner groups, and book clubs.

Bud, Not Buddy

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Hilary Ballon

Kenneth T. Jackson

Includes seven short essays by leading scholars of urban history, stunning new photographs that mark the impact of Moses's public works on the city today and the first comprehensive catalog of his building program. 

The Transformation of New York

A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures. In various roles in city and state government from 1930 to 1965, Robert Moses reshaped the fabric of the city. From Lincoln Center to the Triborough Bridge, the West Side Highway to the Cross Bronx Expressway, his public projects, reassessed in this book by notable urbanists, continue to exert a strong influence in the lives of New Yorkers.

Robert Moses and the Modern City

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W. Parker Chase

Paul Goldberger

A chronicle of the the City, the architecture, and the people of New York City 92 years ago.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Wonder City

New York, 1932

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Historical overview of 5th Avenue and the people who lived and worked there.

The cover is worn, but the text and photos look great.

Fifty Years on Fifth

John A. Kouwenhoven

Describes New York's growth and evolution from village to metropolis in visual terms.

Oversized Paperback (4 to 6 lbs)

An Essay in Graphic History

Columbia Historical Portrait of New York

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Carl W. Condit

A history of the rail and terminal system from the beginnings to Pennsylvania Station.

The book is missing its original dust jacket but is in very good condition otherwise.

A History of the Rail and Terminal System from the Grand Central Electrification to the Present

The Port of New York

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Norval White

Elliot Willensky

This guide is a definitive record of New York's architectural heritage and provides a compact, authoritative directory for lovers of New York City.

The Classic Guide to New York's Architecture

Since the AIA Guide to New York City was first published in 1967, it has been recognized as the ultimate guide to the metropolis's buildings, in all five boroughs -- Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island -- from nineteenth-century brownstones and tenements to modern high-rise apartments and museums. The latest edition of this urban classic takes a fresh look at the architectural treasures that define New York -- from its most characteristic landmarks to its less famous local favorites. To prepare this edition -- the first revision since 1987 -- Norval White has visited and revisited more than 5,000 buildings, making this by far the most complete guide of its kind. This generously illustrated handbook presents the structures of the New York City--from the magnificent to the obscure -- in over 3,000 new photographs, more than 130 new maps, and hundreds of revised and new entries. Beyond the skyscrapers and historical buildings, the guide also leads the way to the city's bridges, parks, and public monuments. From the tip of the Empire State Building to the brownstones in Brooklyn, the AIA Guide to New York City reveals how the city's spirit, fortitude, and character are captured and expressed in its architecture. Thoughtful and humorous descriptions include fascinating bits of local information that bring the city's history to life, telling the stories behind the bricks and mortar. Together, the maps, photographs, and expert critiques invite you on a special grand tour of the city at your own pace. This guide is a definitive record of New York's architectural heritage and provides a compact, authoritative directory for lovers of New York City all over theworld. Its portability and encyclopedic quality make it an ideal traveling companion for any walker in the city. For the sightseer, the architect, or anyone on a casual stroll, the AIA Guide to New York City is the book to grab on your way out the door.

AIA Guide to New York City

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A collection of articles and photographs about old New York.


An American Heritage Extra on the History of the Nation's Greatest City

New York, N.Y.

Nathan Silver

Here is a unique pictorial record of the New York City that has vanished.

Photographs of residences, churches, and other public and private buildings provide a pictorial survey of the significant architecture of a bygone New York

Lost New York

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This is a catalog from the Eames exhibit at UCLA.
Exhibit was from Dec. 1976 to Feb. 1977.
Some pages are loose, but it's an intact catalog.

Connections: The Work of Charles and Ray Eames

Irving Lewis Allen

Traces popular expressions that accompanied the emergence of the New York metropolis.

New York Life and Popular Speech

The City in Slang

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Ann L. Buttenwieser

Traces the historic clash between commerce and recreation as government officials and private developers expanded the borough's borders into surrounding rivers to accommodate growing population and industry.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Manhattan's Waterfront from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Second Edition

A history of Manhattan from the 17th century to the present. The second edition of this text includes two additional chapters that encompass the changes that have taken place in the areas of restoration, legislation, and within the new movements in environmental consciousness during the 1990s.

Manhattan Water-Bound

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Donald M. Reynolds

Surveys New York City's monuments and public sculpture from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

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